Sheol
"One of the most tightly held secrets of the Infinity Corps is the existence of Sheol. Discovered 18 months ago, the timeline sent a shock through Infinity's ranks because of the empty, incredibly high-tech cities it contained. Since then it's become apparent that, in defiance of known parachronic laws, it is rapidly migrating through the Quanta of its own accord. Within another year, it will reach Quantum 6 -- and its technology will become accessible to the Centrum. High priority has been attached to understanding it before it does, and keeping the Centrum in the dark as long as possible." History "Homo sapiens sapiens developed some 40,000 years ago; this is during the Wecshel Glaciation part of the last ice age but also a multi-thousand year period of it when temperatures had temporarily rebounded to near normal. On Homeline, they had a 5,000 year period of cultural flowering, but this was cut short when the ice age clamped down again. On the original Sheolic timeline -- what Infinity calls "Sheol" was a colony of this timeline -- the original technological expansion of humans included two more technologies: agriculture and writing. As the Ice Age got worse about 35,000 years ago, the extra knowledge had let them reach a level comparable to that of the Roman Empire, and had spread into parts of the word (Southern Africa, India, and Australia) where the change in climate was not so severe. Life carried on, rather than going into a relative recession as on Homeline. For the next 3,000 years the Sheols advanced, and some billion Sheols reached and then surpassed Homeline culture of 2015. This included the discovery of crosstime travel about 30,500 BC, when the Sheolic civilization had already reached and surpassed Caliphan levels of technology. They had built vast arcologies, starports, orbital habitats, colonized the Moon and Mars, and even "terraformed" the Earth into warmer temperatures. Even the people of the Sheolic timelines were heavily genetically engineered: larger, stronger, and subtly different from the Human norm in a variety of other ways. By then the Sheols already had settled much of the local space within about 40 light years, so the discovery of alternate timelines led to much less exploration and settlement of other earths. Expeditions and colonies were sent out and, over the next 100 years, 20 timelines were brought into their sphere of control. The period of Sheolic time travel ended because of their emphasis on another aspect of crosstime exploration. Looking to expand their knowledge of physics, the Sheols deliberately sought out very different timelines, where the laws of reality had crystallized out of the Big Bang in varying ways. In 30,406 BC, a colony timeline -- what Homeline now calls Sheol -- opened a gate to a reality whose laws of physics were somehow infectious. Exploding outwards at the speed of light, a bubble of the different laws destroyed all chemical interactions, closing the gate to the other universe when it destroyed the gate's circuits, but still expanding from the sphere into which it had "escaped." During the half a year before this happened, however, all life on that timeline and all other activity depending on chemical interaction were snuffed out. Further, the bubble propagated down the crosstime network through the gates on Sheol that happened to be open at the same moment. Eight timelines in all were "killed," and somehow the shock of the propagation jarred Sheol itself loose from its quanta, moving it quickly and steadily in the direction of Quantum 5 and beyond. The main Sheolic timeline was untouched, and their civilization has carried on in the 30,000 years since. There is no hope of ever visiting it with current crosstime technology: using Homeline terminology, it is in approximately Quantum -25,000." Category:Infinite Worlds